Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday February 19, 2013 @04:53PM
from the keep-calm-and-carry-on dept.

astroengine writes "If calculations of the newly discovered Higgs boson particle are correct, one day, tens of billions of years from now, the universe will disappear at the speed of light, replaced by a strange, alternative dimension one theoretical physicist calls boring. 'It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out. This has to do with the Higgs energy field itself,' Joseph Lykken, with the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., said. 'This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there'll be a catastrophe.'"

The peculiar British pronunciation of boatswain has resulted in bosun becoming an accepted spelling. I'm too lazy to exercise my access to the Oxford English dictionary, but a Mirriam-Webster backed reference claims that spelling dates back to 1865. So hello, 19th century.

The sun will become a white dwarf, which is a post-stellar remnant made of electron-degenerate matter (where the electromagnetic repulsion is not sufficient to hold electrons apart against gravity, and instead they're held apart by the Pauli Exclusion Principle) about the size of the earth. Before that, when it ends its Red Giant phase, it will shed much of its mass in novas. Which are gentle events only in comparison to a supernova. "Explosion" is quite fair. Certainly nobody in the solar system watchi

I am so tired of the 'Mankind's existence is valueless' bravado. We are a billion to one galactic coincidence that has risen to sentient thought and self-awareness. This astronomical concurrence alone is worthy of continuance. If we finally evolve beyond primal tribal and religious bickering, we can get on with off planet settlements... and we have still a cushion of ten billion years to settle other galaxies.

What makes you think it'll be humans that move out into the galaxy and not some other species that only has us as an ancestor? The super-human, to speak with Nietzsche (abused as it was by the nazis, his concept of the Ãoebermensch was not racial in nature, but evolutionary).

We might just be one of a few million intelligent species in this galaxy, but we are likely the only one around for a couple hundred light years.

Personally, I think that living beings and the universe form a symbiotic relationship. We can't exist without a universe, equally, a universe without an observer might as well not exist. By this logic, it makes sense that a universe that wants to exist needs to creates observers in addition to itself.

Correct, with a 100 billion stars in the galaxy and hundreds of billions of galaxies billion to one odds will have occurred 100 times in our galaxy alone. However I dispute that we have any clue how likely intelligent life is. For all we know every habitable zone planet we have found, and perhaps some of the non-habitable zone ones too, have life. Or the odds of life may be so overwhelmingly unlikely we are alone. We simply have no clue and can only make mildly educated guesses based on assumptions that could be wrong.

Intelligence has evolved in various desperate species on Earth -- primates, birds, dolphins -- so it's reasonable to conclude that intelligence is a common eventual outcome of evolution. Opposable thumbs to build technology with, on the other hand, may be rare.

Ask any physicist, what causes a body in relative inertial motion to remain in motion? I guarantee you will come face to face with either ignorance or outright superstition. If physicists don't even know what causes motion (their denials notwithstanding),

Physicist here. Motion is induced by gradients in potential energy fields, and the transfer of potential energy to kinetic energy is associated with acceleration and deceleration, not with motion itself.
See this image [imageshack.us] (where H is the total energy of the

Essentially what you are asking is why are energy and momentum conserved since the laws of motion can all be derived from that. Emily Noether showed that for any conserved quantity there is a symmetry (note this is a purely mathematical proof). For energy this symmetry is translation in time I.e. the laws of physics today are the same as they were yesterday and the same as they will be tomorrow. The symmetry of translation in space gives conservation of momentum I.e. the laws of physics here are the same as the laws of physics where you are.

So effectively the laws of motion we observe are a direct consequence of the symmetries of the space time in which we live. When you add in relativity you get Lorentz transformations (which is undoubtedly what your Russian friend was talking about). Indeed we think of the fundamental laws of physics in terms of the symmetries they obey
Since Noether's theorem and Lagrangian mechanics is taught in first or second year mechanics (depending on where you are) anyone with a physics degree should know this...

You seem pretty ignorant. I take it you haven't travelled much. Yes, there here are thousands of Gods, probably more. Several dozen come to mind in the half minute I take to brainstorm...and I only know a tiny fraction of what there is to know in the world. I bet some Indian tribes could give you a hundred Gods just for their culture alone.

If you get reincarnated, it is likely not in this universe anyways (there are more people alive at the moment that have died, ever, so they have had their last lives likely not here, as this will hold for any other planets as well at some time). So no worries.

Whether or not reincarnation is real, the idea is that people get reincarnated as people and any sort of living creature that exists. So, there's no need to be enough humans at any given time for the idea to hold, as long as there are enough living things. What's more it's been accepted theory for many centuries that only a very small fraction ones incarnations are as humans, most of the time it's as things like ants and spiders.

If you strip out all the BS about being punished if you do not do whatever religion/government/tribe/custom/whatever tells you to do, what basically remains is dualism and a way for the non-physical part to attach itself to a physical intelligence again and again. As in any such hybrid, capabilities on both sides should somehow match in magnitude (not necessarily in nature) for the whole to work (basic signal theory), so I stipulate very roughly human intelligence for the physical part. There is also some indication that in this universe, the interface mechanism is quantum effects, of which a lot are present in the synapses of the human brain. Just shifting the probabilities a little would be enough.

I do however expect that this reasoning is far to rational and pragmatic for most people. They either will decry this as "religion" or baseless mysticism or as as atheist nonsense. Be my guest, I have zero need for you to share my beliefs. If you do however want to discuss, that is welcome.

Your "accepted theory" is not mine. Mine stipulates very roughly human mental capabilities, as reincarnation otherwise does not make sense if derived from dualism. The "accepted theory" is just hogwash to scare people into behaving well, but if you strip that out, something like mine remains.

And yes, thank you, I am well aware of the subject matter. "Reincarnation" does no more indicate your "accepted theory" than, for example, "religion" indicates Christianity, although the proponents of whatever garbled v

The idea that more people are alive than have died is an urban myth; if you google it, estimates are that about 100 billion people have lived and died over the last 50k years. So we're outnumbered by dead people by quite a bit.

If you get reincarnated, it is likely not in this universe anyways (there are more people alive at the moment that have died, ever, so they have had their last lives likely not here, as this will hold for any other planets as well at some time). So no worries.

Now, imagine a new universe expanding inside our own at the speed of light. It hits Earth - We reincarnate somewhere else. It hits there - We reincarnate somewhere else. And so on...

I can't do you a car analogy, but here's the very basic idea (massively watered down, physics friends - I know, I know, but let's try to keep this simple enough):

Consider a ball rolling on a set of hills and valleys. For our purposes, let's make it simple and 2-dimensional, but you can generalize quite easily. A 'vacuum' for this system equates to being at the bottom of a valley, as this is a point of lowest energy, and things tend to roll down and end up in the bottoms of valleys. The shape of the hill (called a potential which relates strongly to potential energy you might recall from high-school/college intro physics) determines the physical properties of the particle like its mass.

However, the valley you're at the bottom of might not be the lowest point overall in the system, it might just be a local minimum. This is what we call a 'false vacuum' in particle physics: A point in the system which looks to all intents and purposes to be a minimum in a small locale. However there could be a lower point.

Now, when you're just dealing with classical systems (like a ball rolling on a hill) this is all well and good. However in a quantum theory the wavefunction describing the particle can happily have non-zero values anywhere and (again very roughly speaking) this means that you can 'tunnel' from one minimum to another with some probability - breaking your false vacuum and moving you to another one. This tends to be in a downward motion - you go to a vacuum lower than the one you're in. This means that the mass of the particle will appear to change, and so all the physics you observe will be completely different.

These effects can related to all kinds of cool physics - the ones often talked in about popular-ish media are inflation/cosmological constant type things - if there is some energy associated with a particle being in a certain state, this can look a lot like a cosmological constant and produce and accelerating universe. However, if this isn't the global minimum there is a probability at all times that the tunneling effect mentioned above can happen, turning off the acceleration.

Anyway, hope that helps. Sorry I couldn't give you a car analogy, but here's an effort at one:

You (the particle) get a Mustang for your 17th birthday (lucky you!) and all your friends are jealous. You then start to think that since all the cars you see around you are worse than yours that you have the best car ever, and act accordingly. However, there is a chance that one day you'll catch glimpse of something sublime - an E-type. And your world view will change - there's a better car out there! Yours is only a false "best car ever", and now you have to act according to your new knowledge, which changes your behavior. Eventually you save up and buy yourself an E-type, moving to the 'true vacuum' / best car ever, and all your interactions with your friends are now based on this new car.

If the theory of our universe being in the shape of a torus is correct we are near the end of this universe!

So far all the theoretical data holds up, explaining the rapid expansion during the beginning of our universe using gravity and not "dark energy". As well as the reason we aren't swimming in equal parts anti-matter, the big bang ejected matter and anti-matter from it's two opposing poles (hmm this sounds familiar). Using the observed period of early rapid expansion the resulting estimated time we m

It does strike me as unlikely, since other timelines of heat death put our doom on the order of 10^33 years (the half-life of proton) or perhaps 10^14 years (the end of star formation). A mere 10^10 or 10^11 is suprisingly quick.

Still, I can think of one precedent for it, the "turning on" of dark energy, about 6 billion years ago. That suggests that the universe could still be undergoing changes on scales in the ten-billion-year range, so "many tens of billions" isn't completely unreasonable.

It doesn't have a lot in common with the idea of a False Vacuum, it's exactly a calculation to determine whether the electroweak vacuum is false or not.

And the answer to stability is currently "at best, barely." Unless measured values of the Top or Higgs masses change by a percent or two when we get better data, the standard deviation lines are currently centered on metastable rather than stable.

Will we have enough time to build the machine to figure out the Last Question? That seems like the obvious solution to the problem. Why wait for some random alternative universe to appear, we'll just make one ourselves...like William Bell in one of the alternative timeline.

The the "true vacuum" spreads at the speed of light. It could be moving towards us and we would never know. Any signal revealing the edge would arrive simultaneously with the event. Shades of the Jame Blish "Cities in Flight" series.

The article says the bubble moves at the speed of light. But I've seen claims that space is expanding or will eventually be expanding so that objects far apart will be moving away from each other faster than the speed of light. Does that mean this 'bubble' wouldn't reach everything?

In his book Cycles of Time, Roger Penrose attempts to look before the Big Bang, and after the end of our Universe.

The general idea is that in the far future the universe is so uniform and cold that it becomes completely uniform, with no sense of scale. All the block holes have evaporated, all the sub atomic particles have decayed away into photons. At this point the universe undergoes spontaneous rescaling, into a very compact, bounded, hot uniform object, busting with all the energy that existed in the original universe.

If I read it correctly, this could be interpreted as the cold death of our universe is the inflationary period of the following one, and the rescaling event is the big bang.

The interesting thing is that he makes testable predictions. The ghosts of energy ripples of cosmic events the old universe should be imprinted on the structure of the following genesis.

The idea here is that the background state of our universe is a so-called "false vacuum" that will at some future point decay into the true ground state, destroying our universe in the process. That's boring.

By far more interesting is the possibility that the Higgs mass has been driven to just above the line of instability by some new physics. This is the first genuinely "that's odd..." moment to come along in high energy physics for quite some time.

I just did my best to read the original paper. (I'm a physicist but this is out of my field). Take-away items (assuming this and a paper it references are correct)

1. It is possible for the universe to have ended up in a meta-stable state as it cooled. Think a little like super-cooled water that will suddenly turn to ice if there is a source of nucleation. The lifetime of this state (given what data we have) can be pretty much anything. The fact that it hasn't decayed yet suggests that if the universe is metastable the lifetime is at least billions of years, and it could easily be MUCH larger. The lifetime is exponential in some unknown parameters.

2. One form of instability would result if the mass of the Higgs, the mass of the Top quark and some coupling constants had a certain relationship. We do not currently have a sufficiently accurate measurement of those numbers to know if the universe is stable, metastable, or unstable - the last being disallowed because we are still here. It is interesting that we are anywhere near the stability boundary and that may imply some interesting physics.

3. If we build a Linear Collider (another $10B machine) it will be able to measure the required parameters to sufficient accuracy to tell if the universe is stable or metastable.

Note: if the universe is metastable there is not imaginable technology that could cause a phase change (read destroy the universe). There are cosmic rays with 10^21 ev enrergies (a billion times higher than LHC) and there have been some head-on collisions on the history of the universe. Nothing we are going to do will trigger a state change.

How do you know we don't want to enter it? It could just as easily be the best thing that ever happened to mankind. And how would stopping discoveries help to fix the world? Help it revert back to the dark ages (after fossil fuels run out)?

Can't we just stop this discovery period and go about fixing the current issues in the world.

Ignorance is a "current issue".

Perhaps, but ignorance of events that will have absolutely zero effect on anyone living now, or any time into the foreseeable future? I'm fine with that.

Meanwhile, millions of children the world over continue to struggle just for enough food to keep them alive, every day. I think it's plainly obvious that is the sort of "current issue" OP was referring to. Granted, it appears their premise is that we may very well, someday, discover something that is generally bad for humans, and that I don't agree with, bu

Will "we" meaning "evolutionarily uplifted intelligent monkeys" be around in 10 billion years? The answer is probably "No". Will the results of our intelligence still be kicking around, possibly even consciousnesses born from us? There's no reason that can't be a "Yes".

However, it will certainly be a "No" unless we know what we need to overcome.

We could certainly all die off before getting to that point, but if it is at all possible to survive that long, there is a real chance that we will, in some form. Nothing about evolution makes that impossible.

In the end, if we maintained, in the past, that the ability to turn lead into gold or some other ridiculous alchemical trick was not worth the time of pursuing, we'd never have gotten as far as we have, and made it possible to have even the population we do have. In effect, future science has already fed and clothed millions, maybe billions of children who would have starved if we'd just did something like spend all our time and money on trying to farm more, using old fashioned agriculture without an understanding of chemistry.

Perhaps, but ignorance of events that will have absolutely zero effect on anyone living now, or any time into the foreseeable future?

Who says high-energy physics only has applications 11 billion years into the future? I think it has a track record that speaks for itself. If we ever hope to wean off of fossil fuels, it will be developments using technologies pioneered by high-energy physics research.

Meanwhile, millions of children the world over continue to struggle just for enough food to keep them alive, every day.

So you'd use the money to invade and stabilize those countries? Starvation is almost entirely a political problem. If you have a way to feed the world on a few billion, you'll have lots of takers.

I'm certain there are many here who actually think we humans will still be around in 10,000,000,000 years.

At some point the "hunt" for these special quantum particles is going to go to far and lead us into an area we as of now don't know we don't want to enter. Can't we just stop this discovery period and go about fixing the current issues in the world.

What? Are you seriously proposing that we stop doing scientific research? Yes, of course, what happens 10 billion or more years from now is completely irrelevant to us as individuals. It might be relevant to our species, however, and the physics behind it is relevant always. Pretty much all of our technology is based on research like this that was once considered merely of academic interest. Who knows, maybe we could discover how to travel to other galaxies by manipulating the Higgs field. We won't know until we try. And it's improbable that anything we invent will be all that much worse than the nuclear or chemical weapons that already exist.

And it's not a dichotomy: we don't have to stop physics research to solve all our current issues in the world. In fact, it wouldn't even help to do so. At all.

There's a very good chance that solving how to prevent the end of the universe, or how to survive in/after it, will produce some very other interesting things as a side effect. That's how science works.

I like physics and I like some quantum theory but calculating that in 10 billion years the universe will disappear hardly seems important.

I wouldn't put too much stock in that number - More like one of those things that could already have happened and we just haven't noticed yet, or might not happen for trillions of years.

As a better way to think about it, take a 6 pack of bottled soda and leave it somewhere just below freezing for a few days. About half of the bottles won't have frozen. If you then open one of the non-frozen ones... Or set it down too hard, or give it a whack with a spoon, you can literally watch it freeze over about 5-10 seconds as a wave of ice sweeps out from one spot (the cap / the bottom / where you whacked it). It does this because supercooled water exists in an unstable state but just hasn't figured out how to freeze yet.

Same idea here, except on a universal scale. At some point, one tiny spot in our universe will "figure out" how to reconfigure itself into a more stable universe. That spot will then expand through the rest of the universe at the speed of light.

Nope. This kind of discovery, pushing the frontiers of knowledge, is the only thing we as a species do that's of any value. Spending all of our effort trying to "fix[...] the current issues of the world" would just drag us down to the lowest common denominator.

It's a fun bit of trivia that draws headlines and can be used to talk to kids about the destruction of the sun, death by meteor, and other fun apocalypses. And who knows: maybe Boson Degredation can be detected somehow, like carbon dating.

Science isn't supposed to be useful. That's engineering. Science is supposed to be insightful in unexpected ways, leading to more understanding.

He said the parameters for our universe, including the Higgs mass value as well as the mass of another subatomic particle known as the top quark, suggest that we're just at the edge of stability, in a "metastable" state. Physicists have been contemplating such a possibility for more than 30 years. Back in 1982, physicists Michael Turner and Frank Wilczek wrote in Nature that "without warning, a bubble of true vacuum could nucleate somewhere in the universe and move outwards at the speed of light, and before we realized what swept by us our protons would decay away."

These seem to imply:
1. a Higgs boson is a metastable state, would decay in top quark
2. the half-life of this metastable state is billions of years
3. the moment even a single such decay event happens, the other Higgs bosons around would "sense" this and spontaneously decay as well, in a sort of chain reaction happening in a Laser medium

If assumption 3 is valid, then 1. and 2. say it can happen any time (with very low probability, but not impossible)

Same as everything else - nothing, nothing at all - then get into a huge argument about something completely unrelated and mind-bogglingly unimportant.

Sadly you are wrong. They will conveniently leave the "billions of years from now" part out and stir up fear so that they can funnel more money that we don't have into whomever's pockets that bought them dinner the previous night in the name of preventing the end of the universe.

And if they can spin it so it's the "terrorists" that will be ending the universe, well then there is just no stopping them...

I'd like to say the sarcasm tags should be implied there, but I'm not at all sure at least one senator/rep

How about they keep their cotton picking nose out of it for once. They are the arrogant branch of a dysfunctional government of a petty country on a backwater planet circling an unregarded yellow star in the unfashionable arm of a rather ordinary spiral galaxy. This is quite plainly out of their jurisdiction.

It does sound pretty similar to all the models I have heard of.1) collapse in on it self.2) keeping moving apart faster and faster until the universe is just one 0 energy, minimal density nothing.3) keep moving apart faster and faster until you hit the speed of light, and than the fabric of space-time rips itself apart as dark energy pushes past boundaries that cannot be breached.

The only really interesting one with much hope is the Big Crunch (#1) as it could possibly lead into another big bang. And explos

While whimsically silly, there is also the notion that a perfectly featureless, flat spacetime of perfect homogeneity is already a singularity, with no need of collapse. The ripping of spacetime from dark energy could therefor be seen as seeing the big bang from the inside of the singularity. (The next big bang would occur in more spacial dimensions than our universe currently occupies.)

The universe only collapses in on itself if it has sufficient gravitational attraction compared to the kinetic energy of its components. It is the difference between throwing a rock in the air and having it come back down (collapse) versus sending a rocket ship to another galaxy (obviously not going to fall back into the earth). The question of whether we would have a Big Crunch, keep expanding, or hit right smack in between the two (run out of energy on an infinite timescale) is an older question. Now th

Under the Big Bang theory, the universe will eventually collapse in on itself, likely at the speed of light. The tell-tale sign will be redshift instead of blueshift being observed from Earth to various astronomical bodies.

Is this what you get when you learn your astrophysics from a mass-market broadcast TV show that uses the name of a physics theory as a double entendre and focuses more on sex than science? Or rather, the alleged inability of scientists to understand sex or even behave like normal humans?

As has already been pointed out, the big bang theory does not require a subsequent collapse.

And we're already seeing redshift as the universe expands. It's blueshift we'll be seeing when it contracts. The Doppler effect l